Ambition to introduce nuclear energy are part of the driving force behind the hysterical war against CO2.

The nuclear industry's whale in the bay is its failure to provide for public risk insurance. The massive damage suffered at Fukushima is being paid for not by the companies benefiting from nuclear energy production but by the surrounding residents and by the taxpayers of the whole nation.

Home insurance companies in Australia long ago varied their policies to include specific exclusion of any damage caused by nuclear processes.

Ask the nuke claque to spell out their proposals for insurance coverage of the population for the supposedly unlikely damage from the mining and storage and processing and transport of fissile material and its use in energy generation.

I agree with most of the article and we have options that may well include factory manufactured, mass produced pebble reactors, which given helium is the preferred coolant, can be sited almost anywhere and brought into production with in days of being trucked in, as wide loads, almost anywhere?

To among a host of other things, support high tech manufacture, our only immediate term future.

We have yet to explore the full potential of thorium, which given the way it consumes its nearly all its fuel, (just a few tons every 25 years) may well be cheaper than coal, which requires millions of tons of carbon creating (mined, transported and washed at considerable cost) coal to be burnt/consumed every year.

Decommissioning? Well even hydro schemes need to be decommissioned and given something can be trucked in, it can have the mounting bolts cut, lifted and be trucked out just as easily, when it's time to decommission?

The large cast iron casks currently used to store nuclear waste, are routinely trucked to storage, as train cargo and somewhere near the middle of a train to avoid giving the driver an overdose of rads.

A piloted road train refueled on route, with regular driver changes, (from pre positioned motorhomes) winding its way through the night to a secret location could be used almost nonstop to truck out an entire obsolete trucked in reactor.

With nobody exposed to more rads anywhere along the way, than they'd be likely to be exposed to, via a single international plane trip?

And given a suitable decent sized and dry tunnel system, say deep in the macpherson ranges, the whole lot just backed in and buried miles inside the deep underground as is?

We have enough thorium it is said, to power the word for as many as 7 centuries, or ourselves for considerably longer if sensibly kept and used here for all the cheap power advantages that would confer on us as we compete with China, which has been experiencing a 30 wages inflation, (the product of massive economic success) for manufactured product market share?
Rhrosty.

Peter, I used to be rather dismissive of ‘learning rates’ when engineers quoted them to offer assurances that some pricey process or other they were developing would automatically become cheaper once it gained traction. But I am no expert and certainly haven’t read the authorities you quote on the subject. Never mind, because it’s not really relevant here. As your graphs show, the nuclear engineering/constructors don’t really need to ‘learn’ anything more than they knew when the overnight costs hit around $1,000/kW, when global cumulative capacity reached 32 GW or so, apparently sometime during the 1970s. In other words further cost reductions due to learning might be nice but are not really needed to make nuclear competitive. Costs simply have to go back to where they were 40 or so years ago. $1,000/kW would make lots of folk happy.

But I do have one more serious issue. You say that nuclear energy “can potentially provide all the world's energy including producing unlimited transport fuels (e.g petrol, diesel, jet fuels)”. That’s a claim of great interest to me because I keep saying that nuclear energy, nice as it might be for replacing all the electricity generated from fossil fuels, still fails to offer substitutes for the other 60% of global fossil fuel applications. Some of that gap is in liquid fuels for transportation and could be filled by electrifying transport. But some aspects of transportation seem intractable to electrification and there are other big gaps left in industrial energy and chemical reductant requirements. You imply that no such gaps exist. Perhaps you mean that they could readily be filled once the potential for abundant cheap nuclear heat and electricity was fully harnessed? Even so, I suspect some major technical problems will remain and substitution by nuclear energy will fall short of 100%.

Tom

Naturally new fangled reactors, with no extended operational record, will have no faults and problems - just as countries from the 1950s thought Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima would be 1 in 1,000 problem free and cheap.

Australia, with its deep experience of reactors, should be the bold new innovator in reactors. No companies can afford the risk - so taxpayer's money will be risked instead.

AUSTRALIAN NEWS

South Australia, with its new waste dump to be, may be the first State to experience new cheap reactors, and pay for them from the State Budget.

INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM

As the fallout from the Belgian explosions settled the plans of terrorists for Belgium's nuclear reactors came to light http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/world/europe/belgium-fears-nuclear-plants-are-vulnerable.html?_r=0

"On Friday, the authorities stripped security badges from several workers at one of two plants where all nonessential employees had been sent home hours after the attacks at the Brussels airport and one of the city’s busiest subway stations three days earlier. Video footage of a top official at another Belgian nuclear facility was discovered last year in the apartment of a suspected militant linked to the extremists who unleashed the horror in Paris in November."

Tombee,

Thank you for your question and thank you for asking it in a way that is genuinely seeking information, not simply a rhetorical question or loaded with undertones of advocacy. In answer, there are a few links you might find interesting;

'Zero emissions jet fuel from sea water' http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/01/16/zero-emission-synfuel-from-seawater/

US Navy Research, 'Converting sea water to Navy jset fuel': http://www.defensetech.org/2012/10/02/converting-sea-water-to-navy-jet-fuel/

"Is Audi's carbon neutral diesel a game changer" http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2015/04/30/is-audis-carbon-neutral-diesel-a-game-changer/
This last link is to an independent cost estimate. However, the estimated cost of $3-$6/gallon using current technology would be roughly halved if the hydrogen is produced by high temp nuclear reactors instead of by electroloysis.

Meanwhile some interesting reading on the dirty little secrets of the nuclear industry. The first one only covers the USA. The situation would be much worse by many degrees in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and of course China too.
Check out these essays:
The Dirty Deadly Front End of Nuclear Power: 15,000 abandoned Uranium Mines
Nuclear Waste Creates Casualties of War In Missouri
Nuclear Power: Dead in the Water it Poisoned

Also keep in mind that the humanly created world-mummery is becoming more and more (psychotically) chaotic every day. And it is NOT going to get any better if the current patterns and momentum continue.